I live out Northwest and those woods are full of cats. They’re half sick and half starved and, I think, really crazy. “Those cats, those strays-they’re not just wild. tucker uses his best medical-words to explain cats to them, shock and disbelief is expressed until dr. tucker, who, while smoking a cigarette in the examination room, tells them that the perp was probably a cat. SO-on page 31, they find a dog who has been all tore up by an animal, and they take him to the local vet dr.

there have been, in pages 9-28, hints dropped of feline presence and unusual animal behavior, but now it’s gonna get way catty. and then on page 29, it’s already the following summer! time flies when you don’t care about your craft! and this second summer is the summer of the cats. pages 18-28 detail the events of their first summer there, including the entire sneakers story arc. it begins on page 9 and pages 9-18 are devoted to their being shown the house and deciding to take it. Quick interruption to discuss how quickly things move in this book.

they get a kitten and name it sneakers and enjoy its company, but at summer’s end, when it is time for them to return to the big city, it’s like their brains melt with WHAT CAN EVEN BE DONE WITH THIS CAT BECAUSE NO ONE HAS EVER OWNED A CAT IN THE CITY BEFORE AND WE MUST RID OURSELVES OF IT BEFORE THE CITY DENIES US RE-ENTRY, and they end up dumping poor sneakers on the lawn of some rando house in the village AT NIGHT because who knows, maybe this family wants a cat! they have kids, after all! Let’s dig into the plot: a couple moves from the big city to an isolated house on long island for the summer.

i didn’t hate reading it at all (three stars cats for FUN!), but the writing is shockingly bad, even by pulp horror standards, it would be a generous two.Īnd maybe you don’t believe me that a horror novel about killer cats from 1974 could be anything other than award-winning prose with a well-constructed storyline and delicately nuanced characters, but don’t worry-i’ll walk you through it. i mean, i’m sorry, but it’s fucking TERRIBLE. I mean, you know about japan’s cat island, right? Hundreds of cats with the taste for human blood? If it were just ONE naughty little killer-cat, you may still have scoffing rights. any of us who have lived with a cat knows that they may be ostensibly domesticated, but they don’t always have the temperament of a domesticated creature. in both Panther! and Cat, the killer animals featured were these kinda cats:Īnd you may scoff and think that a little lap-sized cat is a silly thing to be afraid of, and then i will know you for a dog-owner. This is the THIRD cat-horror book i have read from grady hendrix’s treasure trove of pulp horror, Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction. Spooktober marches on with a spoooky caturday!

The Cats by Nick Sharman